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Sayn
Motivation: teach humanity the value of responsibility, hard work and the truth Caste: Twilight Anima Banner: A red hammer trailing evanescent lines falls on an anvil of adamant, throwing blue sparks. Sayn’s mother was the exiled illegitimate daughter of a Dynast. When her family ostracized her as a worthless by-blow, she sought shelter and anonymity at an insignificant Southwestern village too small to even have a name. Sayn’s father was the smith for that village,who had lived there every day of his life and intended to die there. From his mother, Sayn learned to read and write and work mathematics. From his father, Sayn learned the skills of the smith’s trade and the satisfaction to be found in hard work done well. Tragically, his parents both died in a local epidemic of wasting fever when Sayn was 16, leaving the village’s livelihood more or less in his hands. With his surviving friends and neighbors counting on him and the peaceful rest of his parents’ souls depending on him, he took up his father’s hammer and assumed the man’s place at the forge. He toiled there for decades, growing stronger and more skilled as life in the village went on. It was the life of a Child of Earth, but a secure one to which Sayn felt himself well suited. Security is not a given in the Time of Tumult, however, and in time, tragedy loomed over Sayn’s village once again. A merciless drought struck the land, parching nearby villages and slowly sucking the life from his own. All he could do was work tirelessly at his forge, but he yearned for the skill to do something, anything, to save his home. In desperation, he even cried out for mercy to the Unconquered Sun, whose relentless heat seemed the cause of the region’s imminent ruin. And in that desperation, Sayn received an answer. Blue and red fires of Essence leapt out from his body, filling him with power and reminding him of ancient days when the Chosen of the Sun ruled the world. Flush with energy and ancient memories, Sayn stalked away from his smithy to a section of the cliff overlooking the village. There, with one mighty blow of his heavy hammer, he freed a river that had been trapped and buried beneath the cliff face since time out of mind. Once they’d drunk their fill and tired themselves out splashing in the icy water like children, the grateful villagers would have made Sayn a king or a warlord if he’d asked them to. Yet, the smith knew that only ruin lay in that self-indulgent direction. Instead, he asked only that they let him remain there among them as their smith and spiritual leader. He longed to try to re-create the wonders that he could barely remember from the First Age and to build new ones that would serve the people of Creation as never before, but he would need peace and space for such work. And as his mother had learned many years before, the village offered both in abundance. To this day, Sayn always comes back to that nameless village no matter how far abroad he travels, either alone or with his circle. His skill in artifice is growing, and he will soon try his hand at creating original magitechnical wonders. In the meantime, he forges the mundane tools his villagers need to do their work, as well as the moral and ethical tools they need to live upright and righteous lives. What use would a new and better world be, after all, if its people were wicked and let it collapse into ruin like the First Age did?